Firefox 19 Integrates PDF Viewer, Boosts HTML 5

19 February 20131,637 views2 Comments

Mozilla seems to have picked up the pace of iteration once again, though this particularly update actually has features of note. Whereas an integrated PDF is something Google Chrome also offers, Firefox 19 brings an interesting Retina-specific feature.

Firefox 19 (release notes)
— Built-in PDF viewer
— Canvas elements can export their content as an image blob using canvas.toBlob()
— Startup performance improvements (bugs 715402 and 756313)
— Debugger now supports pausing on exceptions and hiding non-enumerable properties
— Web Console CSS links now open in the Style Editor
— CSS @page is now supported
— CSS viewport-percentage length units implemented (vh, vw, vmin and vmax)
— Starting Firefox with -private flag incorrectly claims you are not in Private Browsing mode (802274)
— Plugins stop rendering when the top half of the plugin is scrolled off the top of the page, in HiDPI (Retina) mode
— Complete list of changes

One of the problems with Retina Macs is that graphics rendering can chew up a lot of resources and sometimes that rendering is poorly done, as well. Firefox 19 makes a play at ameliorating some of that.